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'Dreams' system was nightmare for city of Detroit

Yes, Detroit's new CIO, Beth Niblock, has heard about the "Detroit Resource Management System," the $47.9 million boondoggle known as DRMS and pronounced "Dreams."

In 1997, the city planned to integrate 43 departments and 22 computer systems into one. But by 2003, the price tag had escalated to more than $120 million — and the system still didn't work.

Carl Bentley, who oversaw the program implementation as the city's deputy director of information technology, declined to speak about the city's IT, but he told Baseline magazine in 2002 that DRMS failed for being too sweeping in its approach.

"If I could redo the project plan, I would go back and figure out how to do it in chunks, in smaller pieces versus the mass distribution we eventually did," said Bentley, now the executive vice president of Detroit-based Strategic Staffing Solutions.

The city eventually got the financial pieces of the system to work, but it never managed to get the HR or payroll systems online. Worse, the MacGyvered version of the system is what the city has been limping along on for the past decade.

In 2002, then-city CFO Sean Werdlow told Crain's that the system was using five Oracle software modules to link purchasing, accounts receivable and payable, general ledger, and projects and grants accounting.

But in Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr's plan of adjustment before the bankruptcy court, he specifically calls out Detroit's inability to manage grants as a significant IT flaw.

There were also unintended consequences of some improvements. For example, according to Baseline, the city was able to start paying vendors more frequently than twice a week, but that meant some vendors were receiving checks for tiny amounts.

"The city is writing too many checks for trivial amounts to some vendors; Ameritech alone gets 100 per month," wrote Edward Cone.

Fingers have been pointed at everyone from city employees to the vendor in charge of implementation, IBM Global Services, for Detroit's most famous IT snafu. Yet, for Niblock, the issue is obsolete. Technology, the city — and even standards — have changed since then.

For example, in her first week of work she had to tell the mayor that there had been a significant data breach. Fire and EMS had legacy databases that weren't encrypted but stored people's personal information. At the time they were created, though, encryption wasn't a standard.

"Those databases had been there a long time, so the standards have changed. I don't think people think about that," Niblock said.

So instead of looking back, Niblock is focused on the future. She's committed to lean engineering and ensuring that there aren't unintended consequences to the infrastructure the city is building now.

"If this is Eden, you have these cross-functional teams with subject matter experts and you have technology people, and they work in a room together," she explained. "In (Louisville), we actually had a room you could go into and work with screens and whiteboards so that you are in constant communication."

So, the new Detroit dreams are a lot different than the old Detroit DRMS.